We have arrived!

We have made it safely to Venezia! It feels like we've been traveling for days, but in reality it only took us about 24 hours to reach our first destination: Venice. It started a little stressful with Barrett being told in the Columbus airport that he had no ticket and would need to contact the person who had booked the ticket (which was himself). The lady then told us that the ticket had been reserved for the same dates in 2014 and had marked him as a no-show, also interesting considering we didn't book the tickets until February 2015. After about 15 minutes of stress, they finally figured out their mistake and gave us our boarding passes. We flew from CMH, to Dulles in Washington, D.C. then Toronto, and finally to Milan! We arrived around 11:15 am local time in Milan. All five of our bags came out at the same time! The only problem was, we had checked 6 bags. Phil's bag didn't make it. The lost and found was unable to locate it so we're hopeful that they're able to track it down and get it to us tomorrow.

 We then went through the ordeal of getting SIM cards for our phones. 7, this part is for you! Previous to the trip, we'd contacted Verizon about getting our phones "unlocked" so that they would be usable in Italy. We had been assured by international services of Verizon that our phones were ready to go and would work by placing a SIM card from Italy in our phones. For my iPhone 6 it worked perfectly! The SIM card cost 15 Euros for 2 GB of data, 500 minutes of calling, and 500 text messages (we opted for a Italy use only plan). Once we put a SIM card in Barrett's Samsung Galaxy, we discovered it in fact was not unlocked and therefore not compatible! So frustrating! We ended up just buying another Nokia "dumb" phone for 30 Euros that will work for our purposes just fine.

We then took a 2.5 hour trip from Milan's central train station to Venice! The weather is warm and beautiful! We took an almost sunset vaparetto ride down the Grand Canal and were met by a women who took us to our apartment, which is also lovely.

We just got some pizza and wine and vegged out for a bit. Now it's about 10 o'clock and we are headed out for an evening walk (and possible our first bite of gelato!) I feel like I could pass out, since I've slept in very sporadic increments on the various flights and train rides!

We are happy to be hear!